President Donald Trump lavished praise on himself when commenting on the federal response to the disaster that has overwhelmed Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “I would give myself a 10,” he said on Oct. 19. “I think we’ve done a really great job,” he added, as Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello sat silently by his side in the Oval Office. This was just two weeks after Trump’s visit to the island, where he lobbed rolls of paper towels at hurricane survivors. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, appearing on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, responded, “If it’s a 10 out of 100, I agree, because it’s still a failing grade.”

Like the mayor, few think Trump has responded effectively. “We can’t fail to note the dissimilar urgency and priority given to the emergency response in Puerto Rico, compared to the U.S. states affected by hurricanes in recent months,” Leilani Farha, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to housing, said, comparing post-hurricane relief efforts in Texas and Florida in a damning report issued on Monday by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“Democracy Now!” traveled to Puerto Rico last weekend to see the devastation firsthand. Well into the second month after Hurricane Maria hit, the island remains dark. By official estimates, almost two-thirds of the island is without electricity. In the meantime, the 3.5 million U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico struggle to obtain the basic essentials of life, as thousands leave the island for the mainland U.S., perhaps never to return.

There are people coming to the island, though: the disaster capitalists. As eloquently articulated by journalist Naomi Klein in her book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” disasters both natural and human-made are increasingly being exploited by for-profit corporations and so-called free-market ideologues to reshape vast swaths of impacted societies, undermining social-welfare systems, privatizing public utilities, busting unions and making obscene profits rebuilding. Post-hurricane Puerto Rico is shaping up to be a textbook case of the shock doctrine.

“I wish I had never been introduced to that term,” Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz told us at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum, the large sports arena in San Juan, where she and her staff have been living since the hurricane. “Using chaos to strip employees of their bargaining rights, rights that took 40, 50 years for the unions to be able to determine … it just means taking advantage of people when they are in a life-or-death situation. It’s an absolute mistreatment of human rights. It means that the strongest really feed off the weakest, until all that’s left is the carcass.

Case in point is the $300 million, no-bid contract awarded to Whitefish Energy to rebuild the island’s power grid. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) is the largest public electric utility in the U.S., providing electricity to the entire island of Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria utterly destroyed the grid. Before Hurricane Maria hit, Whitefish, named after the town in Montana where it is based, had only two employees, and had never handled a contract larger than about $1.4 million. Whitefish just happens to be where Trump’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, is from. Zinke’s son had worked for Whitefish Energy in the past. We were in the Coliseum speaking with the mayor when San Juan Vice Mayor Rafael Jaume entered, carrying a copy of the Whitefish contract.

“‘In no event shall PREPA, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the FEMA administrator, the Comptroller General of the United States or any other authorized representatives have the right to audit or review the cost and profit elements of the labor rates specified herein,'” Jaume read, expressing outrage. “You can read about it yourself. That’s black and white.” Both Mayor Cruz and Vice Mayor Jaume called the contract illegal, and demanded its immediate cancellation.

They were joined in that call by Angel Figueroa Jaramillo, head of UTIER, the Puerto Rico electrical workers union. We visited him in his offices in San Juan, which is still without power. As we spoke, news broke that Gov. Rossello had called for the cancellation of the contract. Jaramillo demanded not only that, but also the firing of the head of PREPA, who signed the contract, and a full criminal investigation into all those responsible for it. Like Mayor Cruz, Jaramillo is working to incorporate solar power into the rebuilt power grid, without privatizing the grid in the process.

In the meantime, Fortune 500 Fluor Corp. has also received a $200 million contract to work on the power grid. As Whitefish eventually heads back to Montana, there are two things you can be sure of: More disaster capitalists will be lining up to take its place, and the proud, resilient population of Puerto Rico, growing intolerant of the delays and the corruption, will be increasingly vigilant, while building momentum for renewable alternatives to the fossil-fuel power grid that has failed them.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 1,100 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

Denis Moynihan is a writer and radio producer who writes a weekly column with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman.

President Donald Trump throwing paper towels to hurricane victims during a visit to Puerto Rico.

Five former U.S. presidents recently came together to raise money for hurricane relief for the victims of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. This generous, bipartisan act is one of true generosity and statesmanship.

And yet, as former presidents, all five men know that there’s another way to help hurricane victims, or victims of any natural disaster. The federal government can quickly provide far more in money, personnel, and resources to help disaster victims than even the most generous outpouring of donations by Americans.

Congress recently approved $36.5 billion for disaster relief. That’s nowhere near enough given the scale of the crises from California to Puerto Rico. And further funding is going to run up against a GOP plan to cut $1.5 trillion worth of taxes — about 80 percent of which will go to the richest 1 percent.

It’s a sad comment on the current state of our government, when the current president and Congress aren’t doing enough to help disaster victims using the full weight and power of the federal government, so five former presidents have to cajole millions of Americans to give voluntarily.

I don’t want to demean those efforts. If you gave, you did the right thing. The victims of the hurricanes no doubt need your support and appreciate your generosity.

I’ve got only one friend in Puerto Rico and he’s relatively well off. He’s a professor, and he lives in a nice home in the capital, San Juan. He has electricity and Internet, so he’s been posting photos of the damage.

Enormous trees block roads. Buildings are damaged. After a month of clearing debris and attempting to clean up his own home and neighborhood, my friend is depressed. And, with electricity and internet, he’s one of the lucky ones — some 80 percent of the island still lacks power.

My heart hurts for those who are less fortunate.

As much as we complain about the federal government, it has an important role to play in natural disasters. Paying taxes is never fun, but by paying them, we can create a whole that’s worth more than the sum of its parts.

If your home is incinerated by a wildfire in Montana or California, or demolished by a hurricane in Texas, Florida, or Puerto Rico, odds are you can’t recover without some form of help.

The fortunate have insurance. Yet in my home of San Diego, many families who lost homes in past fires found that their insurance didn’t actually cover the cost to rebuild their homes.

Ultimately, if we are to recover from natural disasters in a timely fashion — before victims who survived the initial disaster lose their lives in the aftermath, and before children lose days of school and adults lose days at work — we need each other. We need our government.

Ideally, we need our government for more than just disaster relief. We need it for disaster prevention. The government can buy homes from people who live in places that will repeatedly flood, allowing them to move somewhere else.

It can work to prevent catastrophic climate change so that hurricanes, wildfires, landslides, and other disasters don’t become more severe or more common.

Individual, voluntary efforts are great, and they produce needed relief for disaster victims. But we need something more.

Those five former presidents could probably make a much bigger impact if they joined forces to lobby Congress and the White House to fully fund disaster recovery efforts and to then take the action needed to prevent these disasters from becoming more common.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

President Donald Trump lashed out at a Puerto Rican officials on Saturday morning after the mayor of San Juan, the island's capitol, criticized the administration's response to Hurricane Maria. (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr/cc)

President Donald Trump is under fire Saturday morning for lashing out on Twitter at the mayor of San Juan, who on Friday raised major concerns about the Trump administration's slow action and misleading commentary regarding Hurricane Maria relief efforts in Puerto Rico.

In a series of tweets, the president purported that unidentified Democrats had told the Puerto Rican official "you must be nasty to Trump." He also claimed "the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico" had demonstrated "poor leadership ability."

Speaking to CNN on Friday, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin had expressed shock at the Trump's administration claims that Puerto Rico's recovery from the devastating hurricane is "a good news story," and made headlines for saying: "When you're drinking from a creek, it's not a good news story. When you don't have food for a baby, it's not a good news story.... Damnit, this is not a good news story. This is a people-are-dying story," as Common Dreams reported.

The president and his team have been broadly criticized for the federal government's slow reaction to the growing humanitarian crisis, with some critics already deeming this Trump's Hurricane Katrina, in reference to former President George W. Bush's botched response to the disastrous hurricane that struck the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Currently in Puerto Rico, most the of island has no electricity—which could take up to six months to fully restore—and nearly half of its more than 3 million residents lack clean drinking water. Food and fuel supplies are critically low, and many are warning that Americans of the U.S. commonwealth will continue to die unless the federal government ramps up its relief efforts.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

There's one loophole in your situation: you're American citizens and can leave Puerto Rico and come to one of the 50 states. In my opinion none of the Caribbean islands have any future due to global warming. They're going to get shellacked again and again. But not all of them have the advantage of being American citizens and can move to the mainland any time they want. The Mayor of San Juan is upset by the Trump administration's lack of concern.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz reacted with shock and anger to acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke on Friday, saying Puerto Rico's recovery is "not a good news story." "This is a 'people are dying' story," she said in disbelief. Then, of course, Trump fought back. President Donald Trump launched a Twitter attack on her for "poor leadership ability," saying she and others in Puerto Rico "want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort."

The people of Puerto Rico are conceived of as poor by the Trump administration. The Puerto Rican government even before Maria was in a debt crisis. The government's outstanding debt exceeds $70 billion with an additional $50 billion in pension obligations. Even before the hurricane doctors were leaving at the rate of one per day. Due to a decade-long recession, more than 50,000 residents leave each year - most for jobs and new lives on the mainland.

So who's left? Mainly poor people. Professionals, especially health care professionals, have left just when they are needed most. You're in a ton of debt. Get out while the getting's still not totally bad. The Trump administration and Republican philosophy in general is not in the business of charity. They believe charity should be privatized. It's not a government function. The only legitimate government function, they believe, is war. Everything else should be privatized. That's why every time Americans buy food for themselves or their pets they are asked by some corporation to donate to charity.

NEW DELHI — It had all the makings of a disaster movie: More than half a billion people without power. Trains motionless on the tracks. Miners trapped underground. Subway lines paralyzed. Traffic snarled in much of the national capital.

India suffered the largest electrical blackout in history on Tuesday, affecting an area encompassing about 670 million people, or roughly 10 percent of the world’s population. Three of the country’s interconnected northern power grids collapsed for several hours, as blackouts extended almost 2,000 miles, from India’s eastern border with Myanmar to its western border with Pakistan.

For a country considered a rising economic power, Blackout Tuesday — which came only a day after another major power failure — was an embarrassing reminder of the intractable problems still plaguing India: inadequate infrastructure, a crippling power shortage and, many critics say, a yawning absence of governmental action and leadership.

India’s coalition government, already battered for its stewardship of a wobbling economy, again found itself on the defensive, as top ministers could not definitively explain what had caused the grid failure or why it had happened on consecutive days. Theories for the extraordinarily extensive blackout across much of northern India included excessive demands placed on the grid from certain regions, due in part to low monsoon rains that forced farmers to pump more water to their fields, and the less plausible possibility that large solar flares had set off a failure.

By Tuesday evening, power had been restored in most regions, and many people in major cities barely noticed the disruption, because localized blackouts are so common that many businesses, hospitals, offices and middle-class homes are equipped with backup diesel fuel generators.

But that did not prevent people from being furious, especially after the government chose Tuesday to announce a long-awaited cabinet reshuffle — in which the power minister was promoted to take over the home ministry, one of the country’s most important positions.

“This is a huge failure,” said Prakash Javadekar, a spokesman for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. “It is a management failure as well as a failure of policy. It is policy paralysis in the power sector.”

For millions of ordinary people, Tuesday brought frustration and anger; for some, there was fear. As nighttime arrived, Kirti Shrivastava, 49, a housewife in the eastern city of Patna, said power had not been restored in her neighborhood.

“There is no water, no idea when electricity will return,” she said. “We are really tense. Even the shops have now closed. Now we hope it is not an invitation to the criminals!”

Tuesday also brought havoc to India’s railroad network, one of the busiest in the world. Across the country, hundreds of trains were stalled on the tracks for hours before service resumed. At the bustling New Delhi Railway Station, Jaswant Kaur, 62, found herself stranded after a miserable day. Her initial train was stopped by the power failure. By the time she reached New Delhi, her connecting train was already gone.

“Now my pocket is empty,” she said. “I am hungry. I am tired. The government is responsible.”

Sushil Kumar Shinde, the power minister, who spoke to reporters in the afternoon, did not specify what caused the grid breakdown but blamed several northern states for consuming too much power from the national system. “I have asked my officers to penalize those states which are drawing more power than their quota,” said Mr. Shinde, whose promotion was announced a few hours later.

Surendra Rao, formerly India’s top electricity regulator, said the national grid had a sophisticated system of circuit breakers that should have prevented such a blackout. But he attributed this week’s problems to the bureaucrats who control the system, saying that civil servants are beholden to elected state leaders who demand that more power be diverted to their regions — even if doing so threatens the stability of the national grid.

“The dispatchers at both the state and the regional level should have cut off the customers who were over-drawing, and they didn’t,” Mr. Rao said. “That has to be investigated.”

India’s power sector has long been considered a potentially crippling hindrance to the country’s economic prospects. Part of the problem is access; more than 300 million people in India still have no electricity. But India’s power generation capacity also has not kept pace with growth; in March, for example, demand outpaced supply by 10.2 percent, according to government statistics.

In recent years, India’s government has set ambitious goals for expanding power generation capacity, and while new plants have come online, many more have faced delays, whether because of bureaucratic entanglements, environmental concerns or other problems. India depends on coal for more than half of its power generation, but production has barely increased, meaning that some power plants are idled for lack of coal.

Many analysts have long predicted that India’s populist politics were creating an untenable situation in the power sector, because the government is selling electricity at prices lower than the cost of generating it. India’s public distribution utilities are now in deep debt, which makes it more difficult to encourage investment in the power sector. Tuesday’s blackout struck some analysts as evidence of a system in distress.

“It’s like a day of reckoning coming nearer,” said Rajiv Kumar, secretary general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

India’s major business centers of Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad were not affected by the blackout, since they are in the southern and central parts of the country that proved to be immune from the failure.

Phillip F. Schewe, a specialist in electricity and author of the book “The Grid,” said the demand pressures on India’s system could set off the sort of breakdown that occurred on Tuesday. In cases when demand outstrips the power supply, the system of circuit breakers must be activated, often manually, to reduce some of the load in what are known as rolling blackouts. But if workers cannot trip those breakers fast enough, Mr. Schewe said a failure could cascade into a much larger blackout.

Some experts attributed excessive demand in part to the lower levels of monsoon rains falling on India this year, which has forced many farmers to turn to electric pumps to draw water from underground.

It was unclear how long it would take to restore power fully in areas still lacking it — or if the problem would recur later this week. In Lucknow, capital of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, Dr. Sachendra Raj said his private hospital was using two large, rented generators to maintain enough electricity for air-conditioners and dialysis machines.

“It’s a very common problem,” he said of power failures. “It’s part and parcel of our daily life.”

Meanwhile, about 200 coal miners in the state of West Bengal were stranded in underground mines when the electricity to the elevators was shut off, according to reports in the Indian news media. “We are waiting for the restoration of power to bring them up through the lifts, but there is no threat to their lives or any reason to panic,” said Nildari Roy, a senior official at Eastern Coalfields Ltd., which operates the mine. By late evening, most of the miners had been rescued, news services reported.

Ramachandra Guha, an Indian historian, said that the blackout was only the latest evidence of government dysfunction in India. On Monday, he noted, 32 people died in a train fire in the state of Tamil Nadu — a reminder that the nation’s railway system, like the electrical system, is underfinanced and in dire need of upgrading.

“India needs to stop strutting on the world stage like it’s a great power, Mr. Guha said, “and focus on its deep problems within.”

Reporting was contributed by Heather Timmons, Sruthi Gottipati, Niharika Mandhana and Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Vikas Bajaj from Mumbai, India; Raksha Kumar from Patna, India; James Glanz from New York; and Matthew Wald from Washington.

September 10, 2011

All of San Diego County as well as some parts of Orange County, Arizona and Mexico exerienced a blackout for about 12 hours Thursday, September 8, 2011, one of the hottest days of the year although the blackout had nothing to do with air conditioning overload or any other kind of overload to the system. It was all caused by some electric company employee in Yuma, Arizona tripping the wrong switch accidentally or replacing defective monitoring equipment depending on which story you want to believe. Just think what could happen if someone such as a terrorist deliberately and determinedly wanted to cause harm to the six million people who were affected by the blackout! This blackout should be considered a dry run to what might happen if there were a major emergency, an actual cutting of the 500,000 volt transmission line between Yuma and San Diego. How easy would it be for someone to merely bomb one of the transmission towers in some remote area and bring the whole system down not to be recovered so easily as merely turning the power back on which is all San Diego Gas and Electric had to end up doing. Even that took them 12 hours!

This power outage should be considered a dry run for such a terror attack or other major emergency, and, obviously, the system failed catastrophically for little reason. The entire electrical grid is in dire need of being overhauled and redesigned so that this type of failure caused by one person doesn't happen again. There is no reason for a local power outage to be transmitted over the entire system. That's totally ridiculous and unnecessary. There should be enough failsafe built into the system such that local failures are confined to local areas. This is a huge failure of centralized power generation and transmission. Instead the power grid needs to be redesigned as a distributed system. Power generated locally including solar or wind power should be able to power local needs without the possibility of being shut down by a systemic event. Distributed power generation rather than centralized power generation is the key. I have blogged previously about the need for local power generation by means of solar panels on rooftops which could provide for local needs. This is more efficient because a huge amount of power is needlessly lost on transmission lines hauling electricity from the point where it's generated to the point where it's needed. Government needs to allow local rooftop generation to be sold onto the grid by home and business owners as was done in Germany, and the grid to be smart enough to isolate local areas from systemic failures. This also distributes the profits freom power generation to a larger group of people which is precisely why the power companies don't want it to be allowed and instruct their lobbyists accordingly

The other lesson to be learned is that San Diego County was totally unprepared for this relatively benign disaster compared to the weather disasters experienced in other parts of the country. It was a totally self-inflicted wound as the result of the mistake of one person which is almost unbelievable. Here are some of the scary scenarios that resulted. People were trapped in elevators. Most gas stations shut down so that people trying to get home ran out of gas on the freeways contributing to huge traffic jams. Ambulances ran out of fuel. Cell phones and landlines went dead. All supermarkets and grocery stores closed making it impossible to buy ice, water or even food. Restaurants closed even fast food places. Sewage pumps failed causing contamination of drinking water. People confined to their homes without air conditioning, the ability to cook, without the ability to make contact with family or friends, with the contents of their refrigerators spoiling were the lucky ones compared to people stranded on the freeways.

Here's what needs to be done. BACKUP GENERATORS. For the lack of backup generators, gas stations closed, super markets and grocery stores closed. ATMs shut down. Even water machines didn't work. The only facilities that continued to operate successfully were the hospitals that had backup generators. It needs to be mandated or otherwise encouraged that at least some strategic services in each neighborhood have backup generators in the event that some huge catastrophe such as this need not happen again. It could even be an advertising promotion for some supermarkets and service stations that their faciilty is "disaster ready" and would continue to function in the event of a power outage. They could even have a little logo posted at their site that they were "disaster ready." The same goes for phone service.Their facilities should be required to be operational in the event of a power outage. Such simple solutions as requiring ATMs and water dispensing machines to not be grid electricity dependent would go a long way. How about solar panel backup for ATMs and water machines not to mention traffic lights?!?

This whole disaster dry run, I imagine, was very educational for potential terrorists. The only thing needed to wreak havoc on and shut down an entire region affecting millions of people was simply blowing up one transmission tower thus cutting the Yuma to San Diego Powerlink. That would have accomplished the same thing as throwing a switch turning off the power. The fact that the power line between Yuma, Arizona and San Diego County was effectively cut caused the San Onofre nuclear generating station, another source of local power, to shut down. Why? It could have continued to function supplying electricity to San Diego County. Instead it effectively said, "Well if Yuma isn't going to provide electricity, neither will I." At the time it was most critically needed, it shut down. Isn't this a complete design failure of the electrical grid? Clearly, the electrical grid, a major component of infrastructure needs to be totally redesigned for the 21st century so that in the event of a major catastrophe, vital services are not completely cut off leaving millions of people to fend for themselves. This should be a lesson to the entire nation!

May 26, 2011

In a stunningly heartless move, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) put strings on emergency relief for the victims of the killer Joplin tornado, saying that other government services would have to be cut to offset aid spending. Yesterday afternoon, the House Appropriations Committee passed an amendment by Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) to add $1 billion in funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster relief fund, offset by cutting $1.5 billion from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program at the Department of Energy. On MSNBC’s Ed Show, Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-MO) called the decision “just plain wrong”:

When you talk about cutting clean energy programs versus cutting subsidies for big oil, let’s have that debate here in Washington. But not on the backs of the people of Joplin.

Scientists have warned for decades that our climate system would grow deadlier as greenhouse pollution from coal and oil increases, with greater floods, heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and storms. Instead of responding to reality by mobilizing our nation to protect people from climate disasters and build a resilient, green economy, Republicans are keeping us tethered to big oil.

“It is staggeringly shortsighted to pay for the economic losses of climate disasters by choking off funding for policies that reduce the threat of future climate disasters,” said Bracken Hendricks, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program is helping US companies right now, to remain competitive and protect good manufacturing jobs, by producing highly efficient vehicles that cut dependence on foreign oil. What’s next? Should we cut funding for flood insurance and slash the FEMA budget to pay for flood damage along the Mississippi?”

Update ThinkProgress has acquired the text of the Aderholt amendment. Of the $1.5 billion cut from the clean cars program, only $1 billion is directed to disaster relief, while $500 million is simply rescinded.